Gray wolves with dire wolf characteristics

Apparently I missed this story last year: Colossal Biosciences has resurrected the dire wolf using CRISPR gene editing technology.

My first reaction: dire wolves aren’t just low-level D&D enemies? No, apparently they were an actual wolf species that went extinct around 10,000 years ago.

Second reaction: how did I miss this? Reviving ancient plants from preserved seeds or tissue is one thing, but de-extincting an animal? They tried it once with the Pyrenean ibex, which has the dubious distinction of being the only animal to go extinct twice. The cloned baby survived only a few minutes.

So, what happened with the dire wolf? Did they start from a reconstructed genome and maybe splice in a little wolf DNA to fill the gaps? No, they just took some gray wolf cells, made 20 edits across 14 genes to make them look a bit more dire wolf-like, and cloned them. They didn’t directly splice in dire wolf DNA at all, and a quarter of the edits weren’t even based on dire wolf DNA, but on ordinary variation in gray wolves.

Cool technology, but claiming to have de-extincted the dire wolf is just marketing.

Apparently the company is working on resurrecting the woolly mammoth too.

But where is my dire penguin? Giant prehistoric penguins were also real. Palaeeudyptes klekowskii, which lived in Antarctica some 37 million years ago, stood about 5'3" but weighed as much as Travis Kelce (~250 pounds).

Sure, its DNA might be too old to recover, but if a gray wolf with dire wolf characteristics counts, I’ll settle for an emperor penguin with linebacker characteristics.